Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925
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23 VB to Winifred Holtby, 26 December 1928. Winifred Holtby Archive, Hull Central Library.
24 VB, Time and Tide, 4 October 1929.
25 VB, Nation and Athenaeum, 24 January 1931.
26 See the extensive bibliography of war books by women in Claire Tylee, The Great War and Women’s Consciousness. Images of Militarism and Womanhood in Women’s Writings, 1914-64, London: Macmillan, 1990, pp. 263-71, and Women and World War 1. The Written Response, edited by Dorothy Goldman, London: Macmillan, 1993.
27 Quoted in Berry and Bostridge, Vera Brittain: A Life, p. 240.
28 A point made by Maroula Joannou in ‘Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth revisited’, Literature and History, 2, 1993, p. 67.
29 Winifred Holtby to VB, 27 August 1932. Winifred Holtby Archive, Hull Central Library.
30 Thus in the foreword to the ‘1st version, Holograph manuscript’ of Testament of Youth, at McMaster, VB writes of showing ‘what the whole war and post-war period . . . meant to the women of my generation’. In the published edition, this is amended to ‘the men and women of my generation’.
31 C.F. Kernot, British Public Schools’ War Memorials, London: Roberts & Newton, 1927, p. 136.
32 J.M. Winter, The Great War and the British People, London: Macmillan, 1986, pp. 65-99, provides a detailed study of war losses relating to ‘The Lost Generation’ myth.
33 Robert Wohl, The Generation of 1914, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980, p. 115.
34 VB, 23 August 1933, Chronicle of Friendship, p. 147.
35 The discrepancies between the records kept by the base administrative staff at Etaples and VB’s account in Testament of Youth of nursing German prisoners are discussed by Douglas Gill in ‘No Compromise with Truth. Vera Brittain in 1917’, Krieg Und Literatur, V, 1999, pp. 67-93. See also Vera Brittain, Because You Died: Poetry and Prose of the First World War and After, edited with an introduction by Mark Bostridge, London: Virago, 2008, xxxiii-xxxiv.
36 VB to Edward Brittain, 27 April 1917, Letters from a Lost Generation, p. 344.
37 VB to Edward Brittain, 31 May 1916, Letters from a Lost Generation, p. 259.
38 For examples of this unwillingness, see Berry and Bostridge, Vera Brittain: A Life, pp. 60-2.
39 VB, ‘A Woman Speaks for Her Generation’, Sunday Chronicle, 23 October 1933. For an interesting examination of the ways in which the Battle of the Somme solidified into myth in VB’s writing, from her diary account to Testament of Youth, see Alan Bishop, ‘The Battle of the Somme and Vera Brittain’, English Literature of the Great War Revisited, edited by Michel Roucoux, Amiens: University of Picardy, 1986, pp. 125-42.
40 Terry Castle reconsiders Testament of Youth in the light of 9/11, in Courage, mon amie, London: London Review of Books, 2003, pp. 41-54.
41 VB, manuscript material for Testament of Youth. VB Archive, McMaster University.
a
Since writing the description of the mutiny at Étaples I have learnt from ‘Songs and Slang of the British Soldier, 1914-1918’, by John Brophy and Eric Partridge (Eric Partridge Ltd.), that the only account of it hitherto published appeared in the Manchester Guardian on several dates during February, 1930. The mutiny was due to repressive conditions in the Étaples camps and was provoked by the military police.
b
Recorded verbatim by Time and Tide, November 10th, 1922.
c
Hansard, Second Reading, July 5th, 1922; Standing Committee D., July 13th, 1922.
d
Hansard, Second Reading, March 2nd, 1923.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Introduction
Preface
Acknowledgements
Foreword
PART I
Chapter 1 - Forward from Newcastle
Chapter 2 - Provincial Young-Ladyhood
Chapter 3 - Oxford versus War
Chapter 4 - Learning versus Life
Chapter 5 - Camberwell versus Death
PART II
Chapter 6 - ‘When the Vision Dies . . .’
Chapter 7 - Tawny Island
Chapter 8 - Between the Sandhills and the Sea
Chapter 9 - ‘This Loneliest Hour’
PART III
Chapter 10 - Survivors Not Wanted
Chapter 11 - Piping for Peace
Chapter 12 - ‘Another Stranger’
Notes to Introduction